2012

[KarmaDope]

Danni, stop digging. The hole is getting deeper.

[Rookie (Rodney)]

The world will end.. But only when the Dharma initiative want it too.

[Jon MW]

...
-  The Mayans (who were wrong about a lot of things, but even more accurate about calendars than we are) have ended their calendar on 21st Dec 2012.  Why?  We don't know, but a lot of other cycles in their calendars are like ours, related to the goings on in the heavens.  Some think the end of the long count is merely counting down to the galactic alignment, but then what is the significance of counting in 5000 year cycles?
...

All calendars are man made, every number in all of them is an artificial construct.

A 5000 year cycle is no more significant than a 1000 year cycle or a 100 year cycle.

What they all do have in common is that groups have linked significant events to all of them, all the time, throughout history - purely based on the fact that they're particularly large and round numbers.

Yes...but:

A day = a cycle of the Earth's rotation.
A month (roughly) = A cycle of the moon around the Earth.
A year = a cycle of the Earth's rotation around the Sun.

Ok, we get the numbers to fit and add in some units to make time keeping easier, but it's all based on astrological events.  In fact the only units we make up are small ones.  So a 5000 year cycle probably has some significance.

lol - no it's pretty much all made up - think a bit deeper

[PocketLady]

Afraid you might have to elaborate due to my mind being inferior.  The way I see it, a year is an (almost) accurate measurement of how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun.  How is is that a made up number?  An hour is a made up number, as is a week, but not a day or a year.

[PocketLady]

Surely if calendars are just made up we would all be living on metric time by now.


BTW, I'm not saying the number 5000 is significant. I'm saying that the Mayans might have used 5000 years as a way of counting down to an astrological event of some kind, or at least the completion of some kind of astrological cycle they were counting, along the same lines as the Earth's movement around the Sun.

[tikay]

Lol.

We are doomed. Spend all your money, quick.

[KarmaDope]

Lol.

We are doomed. Spend all your money, quick.

As I was just saying to someone, world better hadn't end on 21.12.2012 - less bracelets to be won.

[gatso]

has this got something to do with why it's getting harder to get a mortgage? the banks don't want to lend on a 25 year term to people who'll be dead in 4

[tikay]

has this got something to do with why it's getting harder to get a mortgage? the banks don't want to lend on a 25 year term to people who'll be dead in 4

As it happens, the Banks & Mortgage Lenders might just be daft enough to follow that logic train.

[The-Crow]

I read  all the major planets lined up on 5th May 2000. We stood and watched but nothing happened.

Patrick Moore showed it on Tv, it looked great.

It had its own website ..... Revelation13.net

But we are still here, so why worry

[bolt pp]

I'm now ready for the world to end

[Jon MW]

...
-  The Mayans (who were wrong about a lot of things, but even more accurate about calendars than we are) have ended their calendar on 21st Dec 2012.  Why?  We don't know, but a lot of other cycles in their calendars are like ours, related to the goings on in the heavens.  Some think the end of the long count is merely counting down to the galactic alignment, but then what is the significance of counting in 5000 year cycles?
...

All calendars are man made, every number in all of them is an artificial construct.

A 5000 year cycle is no more significant than a 1000 year cycle or a 100 year cycle.

What they all do have in common is that groups have linked significant events to all of them, all the time, throughout history - purely based on the fact that they're particularly large and round numbers.

Yes...but:

A day = a cycle of the Earth's rotation.
A month (roughly) = A cycle of the moon around the Earth.
A year = a cycle of the Earth's rotation around the Sun.

Ok, we get the numbers to fit and add in some units to make time keeping easier, but it's all based on astrological events.  In fact the only units we make up are small ones.  So a 5000 year cycle probably has some significance.

Wikipedia has a good article about time under the definition for second which shows how artificial time is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second

But roughly speaking our way of measuring time has always been essentially based on trying to find something in nature which is so uniform, predictable and measurable that we can use it as a base unit.

So when you say that -  "A year = a cycle of the Earth's rotation around the Sun." - that is precisely the right way round, the earth going around the sun has absolutely no significance in any way other than what we assign to it. Our definition of time has arisen out of various historical imperatives, but if things had gone differently we would be using other measurements instead - and every 100, 1000 or 5000 of them would have groups of people believing that they were significant.

[PocketLady]

...
-  The Mayans (who were wrong about a lot of things, but even more accurate about calendars than we are) have ended their calendar on 21st Dec 2012.  Why?  We don't know, but a lot of other cycles in their calendars are like ours, related to the goings on in the heavens.  Some think the end of the long count is merely counting down to the galactic alignment, but then what is the significance of counting in 5000 year cycles?
...

All calendars are man made, every number in all of them is an artificial construct.

A 5000 year cycle is no more significant than a 1000 year cycle or a 100 year cycle.

What they all do have in common is that groups have linked significant events to all of them, all the time, throughout history - purely based on the fact that they're particularly large and round numbers.

Yes...but:

A day = a cycle of the Earth's rotation.
A month (roughly) = A cycle of the moon around the Earth.
A year = a cycle of the Earth's rotation around the Sun.

Ok, we get the numbers to fit and add in some units to make time keeping easier, but it's all based on astrological events.  In fact the only units we make up are small ones.  So a 5000 year cycle probably has some significance.

Wikipedia has a good article about time under the definition for second which shows how artificial time is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second

But roughly speaking our way of measuring time has always been essentially based on trying to find something in nature which is so uniform, predictable and measurable that we can use it as a base unit.

So when you say that -  "A year = a cycle of the Earth's rotation around the Sun." - that is precisely the right way round, the earth going around the sun has absolutely no significance in any way other than what we assign to it. Our definition of time has arisen out of various historical imperatives, but if things had gone differently we would be using other measurements instead - and every 100, 1000 or 5000 of them would have groups of people believing that they were significant.

Ok I know a bit about physics so I'm hoping I'm right when I say that then surely the same could be said about mass.  The mass of an object can only be defined by comparison as well.  Apparently "The kilogram is the unit of mass; it is equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram".  In fact every single measurement we use is only a comparison to a standardised unit, something "fake".  Therefore time is a real as mass is.  We relate time to what goes on in space,  but what happens in space also effects what happens on this planet, and I'm not talking about horoscopes, I'm talking about the tides, and the seasons, and day and night.

The Mayan's themselves actually used two day-to-day calendars similar to our annual one.  The first was a 260 day cycle, and the other was a slightly less used 365 day calendar as a way of keeping track of the seasons.  Dates from both of these calendars are used when writing a long count date.

[NoflopsHomer]

All of this fails to tell me why my toast always land butter side down.

[tikay]

All of this fails to tell me why my toast always land butter side down.

I expect it's because Nostadamus predicted it. In code, of course.